I recently conducted interviews with a dozen researchers to gather data for my dissertation. It is only a part of the data gathering, but so far it is the most time consuming, in terms of transcribing interviews. But this memorable quote came up in the interview I'm transcribing just now, I found it hit the nail:

There is no truth in science, but we are continually searching for the truth.

And now back to work...

So I started making a simplistic PHP/MySQL/LaTeX self-archiving publication repository, that will allow me to store and display my paper preprints. I have tried a few tools for doing exactly this, and while they are alright, they don't do quite what I want them to do.

Particularly I miss some control over citation formats and link/click tracking. The citation formats may not be important to everyone, but as a librarian, it rather annoys me to have "enter data in any format you like" citation formats, as has been the case in the self-archiving tools I found. So I decided to be a bit more strict in my own tool.

Additionally, I wanted standardised LaTeX preprint PDF's to be produced for all my papers. This hasn't been implemented yet, and I still haven't decided whether I should do this via online compilation from LaTeX code stored along with publication metadata in the database, or if I should precompile locally.

Once the system is up and running, the source code will be published here on the site, and I hope to add a userfriendly interface, allowing other people to easily integrate the tool on their website. But since this entire project is mostly procrastination anyway, I don't expect this to happen in the near future.

The people over at WordPress are kind enough to make a tool where you can actually and easily retrieve data, with lots of handy, well-documented functions that NetBeans can read, so that's a big thumbs-up from me.

So right now I'm working on implementing it seamlessly (hopefully) on my webpage. If you see strange error messages, it means I'm not done yet.

But why would I add WordPress? Simple, I wanted a blog to enable me to quickly post updates on the frontpage, and perhaps even a few thoughts of my own on various topics.